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[Music] hello i'm jennifer whitt director of projectmanager.com well welcome to our whiteboard session today on what is portfolio management we get so many questions from the forum and other sources on what's the difference between project management program management and portfolio management it can become daunting and quite complex but we think it's very simple and that's what I want to help with today just by looking at the definition and some concepts of what portfolio management really is so you know me I like to go to my sources so typically I'll refer you to Google and you can do that for sure but today what I want to reference is a source called applied to the project management body of knowledge the fourth edition by the project management institute PMI you may have your other sources too for project management concepts and framework but this is what I'm going to be speaking with today and I'm sure it's very common to what you reference as well but PMI with the pub a guide to the project management a body of knowledge says that a portfolio is a collection of projects or programs and other work that are grouped together to facilitate effective management of that work to meet strategic business objectives so again it includes projects and programs and other work but I think also a key that I want to point out here is that it's for a strategic business objective how many times have you seen your team kind of lose track of even what they're doing they're so concerned about the tasks and activities and certain deliverables they tend to forget why are we even doing this so it's to meet a strategic business objective a lot of times I reference to groups of people that I learn a lot from number one my artist friends if you know artists whether they're artistic in drawing or maybe musicians all of them talk about their portfolios and they may have different compositions that encompass their portfolio to express express their heart or their mission whatever the whatever their portfolio supports also what learn from our my financial portfolio managers where within a portfolio there may be different types of investments that are in a portfolio so maybe you can glean from those two types of people who you know - who have portfolios so I use that as kind of a basis to learn from but for a for a business they all have strategic business objectives and there are a lot of things that have to be done in order to meet those a lot of projects programs and start forming portfolios so a portfolio again can include projects multiple projects or programs or multiple programs or other work so that's what is encompassed in a portfolio so for portfolio managers they have different types of these or a combination of mix in in their portfolio so number one again a project projects can be broken down into maybe different phases they may be implementing things in different phases or over different time which again you know how those can be broken down and then some projects are just to deliver it's at one high level to produce a certain deliverable for that portfolio programs can include multiple projects and then other work that are simply done to support this as well and for portfolio management it's it's a sit relized management of all of these pieces so for portfolio managers again they have this in their portfolio they're managing this and they're basically looking at identifying what projects have to be done prioritizing those projects authorizing them managing them and controlling them as well so if you look at them you can look at the project's programs and portfolios side by side and they're very similar they're very similar and how they're done so I hope this simplifies what a portfolio is and how it is in relation to not only projects but programs and other portfolios as well so I hope this helps you in managing your portfolio and better yet understanding how it can be more simple at projectmanager.com we've tried to take a complex topic and make it simple by incorporating different features and functionality in our software so if you are looking for a tool to help you manage your portfolio which is a combination of projects and programs then sign up for our software now at projectmanager.com